All Tomorrows

The Hand Flappers were one such species. Their wings, once used for butterfly-like flutters in the unearthly gardens of Qu, had shrunken and reverted back into their manual condition. Their legs were likewise re-adapted, but they bore a splayed awkwardness from their perching ancestry.

Only a singular, and an almost sadistically simple flaw held them back from developing civilization. In the course of their secondary atrophy, the wings of the Hand Flappers had become useless as hands as well. Their flag like appendages were very useful in signaling and mating dances, but they couldn’t hurl missiles, construct shelter or even manufacture basic stone tools. All that they could do with their useless hands was to display each others’ sexual availability, so the Hand Flappers did just that; flashing and dancing their way to oblivion.

A Hand Flapper on the edge of his mating territory. During their almost comical exaggeration of sexual display, his kind has begun to lose their edge at adaptation. Theirs will be a boisterous, ecstatic but ultimately ephemeral existence.

Blind Folk

When the Qu came they dug in, and dug in deep. Inside several continent-sized shelters under their besieged world, they waited for the invaders to pass them by. It was a futile gamble. The Qu located the shelter-caves and remade their inhabitants without effort.

The shelters became home to an entirely different ecology, a realm of perpetual darkness, fueled by the trickle of water and nutrients from the world outside. A surprisingly complex ecology developed on this scant resource; gigantic pale insects; the descendants of common household pests, competed with Dali-esque birds and rodents over fields of overgrown fungi. Predators were not uncommon; almost crocodilian fish patrolled the underground streams and vast blind bats, echolocating with unnerving precision, took their toll on the residents of the cave floor. The kilometer-high ceilings of the shelters glowed in the dark with protean constellations of bioluminescent fungi, and in some cases, animals.

People were present here as well, albeit in unfamiliar forms. They were more often heard than seen, as they tried to find their way in the dark with banshee-like screams. These albino troglodytes lived in a realm where sound and touch, not sight, was the gateway of perception. They had developed long, tactile fingers, enormous whiskers and mobile ears to live in the dark. Where their eyes should have been, there was nothing but a patch of haunting, flawlessly smooth skin. Their perfect adaptation to the world of darkness had erased the most basic feature of human recognition.

As adapted as they were, they were doomed. Before the Blind Folk could develop any kind of intelligence to crawl out of their geographical graves, the glacial constriction of their World’s continental plates snuffed out the shelters one by one.

A startled Blind father with his year-old daughter. Although he knows better to sit still in order to confuse sonar-equipped predators, the youngster screams and soils herself in terror. Their attenuated fingers are hallmarks of a lifetime spent in darkness.

Lopsiders

The Qu were grotesquely creative in their redesign of the human worlds. One group of misfortunate souls they transported to a planet with thirty-six times the amount of “normal” gravity, and made them over for life in this bizarrely inhospitable realm.

The results of these experiments resembled nightmare sketchings of Bosch, Dali or Picasso. They looked like cripples squashed between sheets of glass. Three out of their four limbs had become paddle-like organs for crawling; only one of their arms remained as spindly tool of manipulation. This singular, wizened limb also doubled as an extra sensor, like the antennae of an insect.

Their faces were different horrors altogether. All pretensions of symmetry; the hallmark of terrestrial animals from jawless fish onwards, were completely and utterly done away with. One bulging eye stared directly upward while the other scanned ahead, in the direction of the creature’s vertically-opening jaws. The ears were likewise distorted.

Monstrous as they looked, these ex-men thrived in their heavy-gravity environment. Once again there was the usual explosion of species into every available niche, and the Lopsiders consolidated their chances for a renewed sentience.

A Lopsider feeds some indigenous pets native to his high-gravity world. The domestication of native fauna is the Lopsiders’ first step on the long way towards civilization.

Striders

While the Lopsiders were redesigned to live under extreme gravity, another species had been adapted for life under the exact opposite conditions; on a Jovian moon with one fifth of Earth’s gravity.